1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the stuffing of pitted olives with edible food, and more particularly, it pertains to an olive stuffing method that is suitable for a mechanized olive stuffing operation.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Prior to the present invention the only feasible procedure for stuffing olives has been by hand. Hand stuffing requires a worker to pick up a pitted olive and insert, usually with a specially designed hand tool, a folded strip of edible food, such as pimiento, into the pit cavity. A folded strip of pimiento has a slippery texture, is rather moist, and is very difficult to guide into the small cavity; therefore, several attempts at stuffing a single olive are frequently necessary. It is apparent that due to the time consuming manual process and the cost of labor, hand stuffing is very expensive and, in some labor markets, uneconomical.
Attempts have been made at automating or mechanizing the olive stuffing process, but to the applicant's knowledge, no one has devised a machine that is capable of successfully and economically inserting pimiento pieces or other pieces of edible food into the small cavity of a pitted olive. The pimiento is hard to handle because of its flexibility and slippery texture. The size of the pimiento should be sufficient to fill the pit cavity of an olive, and, because of the pimiento size and flexibility, it is very difficult to stuff into the small pit cavity of the olive.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,502,929 and 2,351,788 disclose an operation for filling pitted olives mechanically with a flowable stuffing material, such as a pimiento paste, that sets to a jelly form within the pit cavity of an olive.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,578,496 teaches an apparatus and a method for comprising pimiento into sheets having uniform thickness and cut into strips for stuffing. Other prior art patents that disclose systems for mechanically stuffing strips of pimiento into pitted olives, such patents including U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,567,590; 2,597,933; 2,609,853 and 2,637,653.
Paste stuffing of olives has been found to be generally unsatisfactory because if the paste is made stiff enough to remain in the olive, it flows slowly and is difficult to handle. Then, after the olives have been stuffed, the paste usually works out of the olive pit cavity. If the olives are to be stuffed with strips of pimiento, the conventional hand operation is slow and expensive and machine operation has heretofore not been reliable because of the difficulties involved in handling the slippery and flexible pimiento.